Hanover County’s school board implemented Governor Glenn Younking’s transgender student policies. But a federal judge just found the policies violate the rights of a would-be student athlete.
Janie Doe, a pseudonym used by an 11-year-old transgender Hanover County student, can try out for her school’s tennis team after a federal judge found a school board policy barring her from playing violated her civil rights.
Janie filed her complaint in federal court in July. The policy, authored by Governor Youngkin’s Department of Education, bars her from participating in girls' sports because she was born biologically male. The county argued it was a matter of fairness, but in an opinion issued Friday, District Judge Hannah Lauck said quote “it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being… transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.”
The US Supreme Court has found previously that being trans is a sex characteristic making it protected under the term “sex” in nondiscrimination laws.
Title IX is the federal law that bars discrimination in schools, and while the separation of sexes is allowed in some cases, Wyatt Rolla, an attorney with the ACLU of Virginia who represented Janie, said that separation can’t cross the line into discrimination.
“As a trans girl, with her specific facts, she should be able to play on the girls' team. She doesn't want to abolish girls' teams and boys' teams," Rolla told Radio IQ. "She wants to play with her friends on the girls' team.”
Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares joined Hanover County in defending their ban. But that argument has failed to sway federal courts that have jurisdiction in Virginia.
In a recent statement related to a similar trans sports ban in West Virginia, Miyares said allowing trans girls to play would “undermine decades of progress and is simply unfair to women and girls.”
Hours after Lauck issued her order another dispute challenging new transgender protections added to Title IX by President Joe Biden was blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court. The ruling was procedural, dealing with the posture of an earlier injunction blocking the rules from going into effect, but Miyares still celebrated the high court win.
"We are happy that the Supreme Court rejected the Biden-Harris administration's attempt to narrow the district court's ruling which prevented the administration's Title IX rewrite from going into effect in Virginia," he said in an emailed statement.
But Rolla noted existing federal precedent which relied on the original language of Title IX was the basis of current precedent which protects trans kids in sports and other facilities in Virginia's public schools.
"Schools are obligated to protect all students, that includes transgender students," he said. "And the way the sports ban is written, it just doesn't do that."
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
